Anne just smiled. She saw the lady talking and then wiping her nose. ‘Don’t mind me, I get emotional,’ Sheila said.
‘I know your mum,’ Anne said.
‘Of course, you did. Of course. And she spoke fondly of you all her life, Mrs Blake.’ The woman looked at her sister and bit her lip and took the towel to dab her eyes. ‘Look, I’m away again!’
Anne stared contentedly down the hall, as if seeing a great deal there, her own life and the lives of other people, and when she turned to the old hall mirror she remembered Harry. She asked herself if the bed upstairs would still be the one they bought.
Luke went out to get the bags and stopped to look up. It seemed for a minute that everything around him was available, and he knew, just there, standing at the open boot of the car, that this was a night he would always remember. Years on, perhaps, when it happened he was sixty or seventy, he would remember York Street and the look of the promenade and would still see Anne in the lighted hall with those women. The house was tall and it looked like an old B&B with lace curtains. Before he went back in he thought about Harry’s letters. They were full of advice about how she could develop her photographs, about how to work with contrast not only to get at life but to enhance it. Luke saw their past with Harry’s voice in his head, and realised he could hear a conversation between them. When he brought the bags in to the hall he could see Anne standing apart from the women, contented but lost, and he returned Harry’s words to her without opening his mouth.
I love you darling for your promise and the things I never had. It takes courage to be a true artist and I don’t even have enough to catch the train.
Don’t talk to me about what’s true, Harry. No more, do you hear me? No more about the truth. Life isn’t a photograph.
Isn’t it, darling?
Anne reached over and touched some scarves that were hanging on the pegs, a few coloured scarves, one of them with mittens sewn in at each end. She took off her glove and gently put her hand into one of the mittens, and smiled.
‘Will she be okay with the stairs?’ Sheila asked.
‘No bother,’ Luke said. ‘Thank you.’ She reached up and kissed his cheek, then turned to Anne.
‘I’m leaving you to get settled in,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be here, Mrs Blake, if there’s anything you need. If there’s anything at all you want you just tell me, okay?’
Anne moved with surprising steadiness up the stairs and Luke came behind with the bags. At one point, on a high landing, she stopped and he waited a few steps behind. When he looked at her face he saw a trace of something young, as if the landing light knew and liked her. For a moment he imagined a young woman contemplating a fresh start, coming up the stairs with a vision of work and the man she loved. Did he ever come? Framed drawings of seabirds were hung around the landing.
It was warm inside, curiously warm, as if the heating had only recently been turned on again in the room. When they stepped inside Anne just walked to the middle and stopped. ‘Don’t put the light on,’ she said. He closed the door and stood with his back against it and watched her step around the bed and put her hands on the window. The sky outside seemed blue in the way time itself can be blue, a perfect dusk with Blackpool framed in the windows. Anne looked out as if the scene was something she had always known. She didn’t move. And after a moment she turned.
‘Is that you, Harry?’
A MIND OF WINTER
The truth would keep for another day. Anne was sitting by the window with a cup of tea in her lap and Luke was unpacking the bags and placing things in the bathroom. On the keyring there
were smaller keys which Sheila said were for cupboards above the sink. She said they were full of old things belonging to Anne. ‘Mostly papers, I think. My mother warned the whole family not to interfere with Mrs Blake’s privacy.’ Luke asked her why her mother was so strict about it. ‘I’ll tell you when we sit down and have a drink, love. Your grandmother was good to us. She was good to us and we don’t forget.’
He’d never seen one before, a bedsitter. That’s what it was, a fine old bedsitter in Blackpool. The bed was under the windows and was made up with a fresh white eiderdown. There was a table with two chairs and a vase of roses Sheila had placed there. Anne bent down to sniff the flowers and she said how nice and warm it was in the room. Along the wall on the other side was a bed settee that Sheila had made up for Luke. The light was dim and perfect, Anne thought: just enough to make you concentrate on the view, because that’s what you came for. ‘I’ll tell you,’ Anne said. ‘We got a lot of things wrong but we got a lot of things right.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Because we knew what to look for, just like you.’
‘Why do you say that, Gran? I’m not a photographer and I never did any of the things you did.’
‘Yes, but you’ve got the spirit.’
‘That’s nice to hear.’
‘Some of them said there was … that’s right … justice in it.’
‘Justice? That’s a big word.’
‘That’s what it was,’ she said. ‘Making it real.’
She rocked a little in the chair. She rocked and the movement gave something to her words and to the evening light that came from the window and made a pattern on the bed.
‘Are you all right, Gran?’
‘I could just sit here.’
Luke pulled a bottle of Talisker from his rucksack and poured himself a decent measure. Sometimes whisky is just right for finding and knowing the heart. Across from the bed, two large photographs hung in simple frames. One of them had a label, saying ‘
Winter, Fifth Avenue
Alfred Stieglitz’ and the second showed the old Wills cigarette factory in Glasgow, a flyover and a motorway in the foreground. He knew it from walks his gran took him on when he was a child.
Two full bottles of bleach stood in the sink. Luke didn’t know for sure that other people often stayed here, but the feeling was confirmed when he found some loose Argos bags in the wardrobe and a Zippo in a cereal bowl. It was a guesthouse and the landlady had said rooms could be scarce in Blackpool in the summer months. What Luke found harder to understand was why Sheila and her family would’ve kept faith with ‘Mrs Blake’ through twenty-odd years of her hardly ever being here. Did she phone them regularly when her mind was right? Had she come on trips without saying to anyone back home?
He bent down to see the books. Roger Mayne:
London Photographs.
Mark MacDonald:
The American Still Life. Darkroom Handbook and Formulary
by Morris Germain. On the bottom shelf, he found another series and he put down the glass. They were his university books. Here they were, all the stuff he had studied for his degree, the novels, the textbooks, set out next to each other. Good God.
The Trumpet Major
Seeing them together gave solidity to some part of himself that he’d never considered defined. Here it was: personal history. He had met the world with these books, and seeing them together made him nostalgic for a person who was once keen to be transformed. Long before he
became a soldier, the mystery of life was all in the mind, and now his books were physical evidence of what Anne once called ‘your itinerary’.
He looked over to where she sat. She had preserved what she could of his young mind’s entanglements. Up to a certain point she had kept pace with what he was learning and she must have known he would travel into other worlds, as she had, into fresh landscapes with their own souvenirs. She had taken steps to know him in the real time of his experience, not because she knew better but because she loved him.